Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Mike Evans Is a Shock Jock for Armageddon and a Cheerleader for the Apocolaypse
May 8, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
Prominent Christian Zionist leader Mike Evans recently claimed that he would be leading this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day’s annual silent march from Auschwitz to Birkenau in Poland “in a procession called the March of the Living, designed to highlight Jewish resilience and survival along the path where thousands of Jews were killed during Nazi death marches in the 1940s,” Religion Dispatches’ Ben Lorber and Aidan Orly reported. The organizers of the march pushed back quickly against Evans, saying that he would be participating in the march, but that he had “no official role in the planned events” (https://religiondispatches.org/why-did-an-antisemitic-christian-zionist-have-the-chutzpah-to-declare-that-he-would-be-leading-a-holocaust-march/).
Evans, who heads the Friends of Zion Heritage Center, is a strong supporter of Donald Trump and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He embodies muscular Christian Zionism; he is a shock jock for Armageddon, a cheerleader for the apocalypse. While he is not the most prominent Christian Zionist leader (Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United For Israel, and Robert Jeffress have greater followings), he nevertheless is savvy enough to frequently inject himself into the news.
According to Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch (https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/19/christian-zionists-israel-trump-netanyahu-evangelicals/), “Evans excoriated Israel’s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for joining a coalition of Israeli centrists and Arab Israelis who he fears may support a Palestinian state.”
“’We gave you four years of miracles under Donald Trump and this is how you show your appreciation,’ Evans wrote, vowing that he and his followers would join the outgoing prime minister in opposition to the government. His outburst reflected anxiety among American Christian leaders who fear the outsized influence they exercised in the era of former U.S. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu will be severely diminished, renewing prospects for a Palestinian state, which many see as antithetical to God’s plan for a Greater Israel.”
The long hard slog that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often talked about in reference to the War in Iraq has been fully embraced by Mike Evans. He is well-connected, well-traveled, has several best-selling books to his name and a bent for the hyperbolic.
While Christian Zionism has roots going back several hundred years, over the past several decades, Christian Zionism has become a major force in U.S. politics, particularly as it relates to U.S.-Israeli relations.
As Political Research Associates’ Steven Gardner wrote in July 2020, Christian Zionism is grounded in the belief that Israel plays a critical role in the Christian right’s End Times scenarios. Therefore the movement generally aligns itself with Israel’s most reactionary policies.
Gardner wrote:
Christian Zionism refers to a movement among Christians, mostly Charismatic and evangelical, whose interpretation of the Bible mandates their political support not just for the modern state of Israel, but an expansionist version thereof. The movement believes that the entirety of Jerusalem—particularly the Temple Mount, where they expect to see the Temple rebuilt—the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights, all rightfully belong to Israel: a biblical land-grant that doesn’t merely fulfill a scriptural promise to the Jewish people, but stands as the cornerstone of Christian prophecies and as a sign that the End Times are close upon us. In other words, they claim the authority of religion in formulating a no-compromise position with respect to sharing land with the Palestinian people.
In the early 1990s, while campaigning against Oregon’s restrictive proposition against the LBGTQ community, Gardner spoke at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center on Portland. An audience member wondered that in light of the Christian Right’s support for Israel, why should the Jewish community be worried about them?
Gardner noted that “Yes, the Christian Right supports Israel. They see the establishment of the modern State of Israel as fulfillment of prophecies they believe to be necessary to the Second Coming of Jesus. They want to see the Temple rebuilt and for Israel to expand to control all of the territory described in Scripture. They believe a tiny minority of living Jews will, in the End Times, convert to Christianity and the rest will be damned to hell for their disbelief. They are, on those grounds, no friends of Jews.”
“But even then, I recognized that it was a partial response, because Christian Zionism is much more than a set of beliefs about the role of Israel and the Jews in the Second Coming, beliefs that are all too easy to trivialize for those who don’t share them. Rather, Christian Zionism is part of a set of interlocking, theologically grounded beliefs about how Christians should engage with the political world.”
Evans had "made himself a major religious-movement and media figure long before his new book was published," John Stauber, former executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and the co-founder of PRWatch, told me a few years back. Although "he pegs himself as a 'journalist', he's really a right-wing religious political advocate with great media marketing savvy."
In a television interview after the Israeli elections, Netanyahu’s U.S. envoy Ron Dermer said “People have to understand that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians,. About 25 percent [of Americans] … are evangelical Christians. Less than 2 percent of Americans are Jews. So if you look just at numbers, you should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to evangelical Christians than you would do to Jews.”
Many critics of Christian Zionism reference its underlying anti-Semitism. “There is evidence of fairly significant anti-Semitism among many Christian Zionists, especially hard-line Zionists who believe that for the rapture to occur, Jews need to return to Israel and then convert to Christianity,” said Catherine Loy, an associate lecturer at the University of Roehampton in London, who has written about Israel’s relations with evangelical Christians.
“The Christian right held a huge amount of influence socially as well as politically, and I don’t see that waning because of a change of an administration in Israel,” Loy, said. “And Biden has shown no sign of trying to challenge the Christian right over Israel. He won’t move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv. I would say he is trying to leave well enough alone.”
While it is fairly certain Mike Evans will not be a recipient, he was put up for the Nobel Peace Prize by Bobby Brown, Senior Vice President of Ariel University in Israel.
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